Malevolent Read online

  “Nothing.” But what did Tim care if this guy he’d never see again knew how pussy-whipped he was? “My girlfriend’s gonna bitch, that’s all. I told her I’d be home an hour ago. This’ll give her more proof of my irresponsibility.”

  “Least you got one. A girlfriend. I’m dating myself these days.”

  So am I, Tim considered contributing, but didn’t.

  “Since you’re already in trouble, why don’t you stop by and see my place.”

  Tim threw a leg over his bike. “Thanks, but I’d better get going.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Tim watched him shrug it off. With a sudden and quite uncommon burst of insight, he knew the dude wanted to show off his place. He was proud of it. And he’d probably be sitting alone in there into the wee hours and could use the company.

  “On the other hand,” Tim said, “I’m only a minute from home. And my girlfriend hates me already.”

  “Cool,” said the video dude.

  Chapter Three

  She’d left a light on for him, as he’d assumed she would. He could hear one of the season’s first moths beating its dinged-up wings against the flickering yellow bulb over the vegetable sink in the kitchen.

  “Do you really need that at this hour? Late night calories are the ones that don’t say good-bye.”

  He’d heard his mother padding down the stairs and she’d obviously heard the refrigerator door opening and closing. As he pulled the tab, Polly Solloway hissed in perfect pitch with the skwoosh of escaping fizz from his beer.

  “Aw, Ma,” he said. He tapped one of her solid shoulders, a greeting as well as a haphazard apology.

  “Hmph,” she said, rolling her eyes dramatically. She plopped into a kitchen chair, cinched her already tightly cinched thin cotton robe, yawned dramatically and nodded at the clock.

  The plastic timepiece was unapologetically kitschy, a boy in Alpine gear who’d pop out of a colorful chalet twice an hour while a caged cuckoo cried out the passage of time. The clock had hung defiant of style or taste from the same wall since Griffin was a child.

  At this particular moment, their Swiss-motif timepiece reported it to be 4:17 a.m. His mother’s frown said that respectable people didn’t crack open beer cans at that hour.

  Griffin shrugged, grinned, swigged.

  She clucked her disapproval, making it her final word on the subject. His mother was, if nothing else, a gracious loser. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  Griffin joined her at the kitchen table. He had to think about how to start. Something just wasn’t sitting right.

  “What is it?” Polly demanded, her voice adopting that excitable whine that struck him like fingernails on a glossy magazine. “We have a bad day? Oh Lord, I told you to stay out of Cleveland with our insurance money. What was wrong with Parma? I knew this would—”

  “Ma, everything’s fine with the store. We only did about twenty bucks by midnight, but it got busy after that. We added a hundred or so by closing.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, still staring him down until she worked it out of him.

  First, he poured the remaining half of the cold beer down his throat. Beer always tasted better in the summertime, he reflected, though he couldn’t remember ever turning it down even in the dead of winter.

  “We had a little excitement down the street,” he said. “Woman got attacked.”

  Attacked? As innocuous a word as he could manage for his mother’s sake.

  Polly clenched her thin robe even tighter, as if she herself were the object of the deranged lust. For an exquisite moment, she had absolutely nothing to say. She repositioned the Amish children salt and pepper shakers on the Formica tabletop. Her eyes darted to the night beyond the lacy curtain covering the room’s one small window.

  “The police were on the scene practically before the screaming stopped,” Griffin added, his intention to defuse, however slightly, Polly’s reaction to the big bad city and her child’s blame for putting their inheritance at its mercy.

  “The screaming,” she said.

  Okay, so he’d been a little too descriptive.

  “Did he kill her?” she asked in hushed tones. As her cheeks flushed with what Griffin guessed to be equal parts dread, horror and excitement, she looked like every face in the crowd that night.

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Well, still,” his mother muttered, the glitter fading from her blue eyes. “That’s exactly the reason I urged you not to open for business in that city.”

  “Because you thought I’d get raped?”

  Her raspy sigh told him that this was no time to joke, and yet a giggle threatened to break free from her.

  As a further distraction, he almost told his mother about his new friend, Tim. In fact, the first words—“Oh, by the way…”—were already out of his mouth when the doorbell chimed and made them both jump and suck air.

  Polly’s face went pale, her eyes wide as one hand fluttered to her mouth. Griffin took her other hand and squeezed it once. He rose shakily from his chair and walked toward the front door.

  “Griffin!”

  “It’s okay, Ma.” Wishing he believed it.

  It was a stranger he saw through the porthole window in the front door, but he unlocked and opened it anyway. She looked up at him and studied his face.

  “Mr. Solloway? Griffin Solloway?” she said. “We’re sorry to disturb you at this late hour.”

  Yes, he knew her now. But the knowledge didn’t calm his edginess. In fact, her presence on his front stoop started to give voice to the dull, nameless anxiety he’d felt since earlier in the evening.

  “He did it, the demon with the dirty movies. He did this to me.” What he’d heard from that woman sprawled on the sidewalk as the police arrived, but hadn’t mentioned even to his new friend, Tim.

  The attractive young woman on his doorstep was slimmer and smaller than average, but the directness of her gaze added muscle pounds and inches. Griffin couldn’t help wondering where she kept her gun. Probably in the small of her very small back.

  The man looming in the shadows behind her was broad and tall. The bill of his cap identified him as a Parma police officer. No doubt tagging along as an escort for this out-of-jurisdiction interview.

  The lady cop flit her gaze from Griffin to his mother, hiding in the shadows like the male cop. She identified herself as Detective Melinda Dillon from the Sex Crimes Unit of the Cleveland Police Department, and Polly said, “Oh.” Said it the way she might have sounded if Detective Dillon had announced that she had AIDS and would like to sleep with her son.

  Griffin nodded in reply to a question that had been asked ages ago. Yes indeed, he was Mr. Griffin Solloway.

  Detective Dillon’s sharp eyes flashed back to his mother.

  “Polly Solloway,” Ma said. “His mother.”

  In the hard-edged noir films from the 1940s which he adored, the hero always stayed cool, his tongue firing clever dialogue like the bad guys rattled machine guns. But Griffin couldn’t think of a single wisecrack to fill in the dead space after introductions had been made.

  The tall Parma cop’s shoulder-mounted radio belched static. Still just a shadow in the background. Maybe he didn’t actually have a face.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Solloway,” the lady cop said, “but I wonder if we can talk to your son.”

  Griffin led the two to the living room. The shadow cop still didn’t speak. He looked too big for the cluttered space. He might have thought so too, for he found himself a patch of corner and stayed there. Ma, Griffin knew, had retreated only as far as the kitchen, where she’d hear every word.

  “Mr. Solloway,” the lady cop started, “can you tell us exactly what you did earlier this evening and who you were with?”

  Toss Humphrey Bogart a line like that and he knocks it out of the park. But all Griffin Solloway did was sweat.

  Chapter Four

  She was out there waiting for him.

  He was up and on the move even b
efore coming fully awake. The cold floorboards under his bare feet brought him the rest of the way around. The linoleum kitchen floor, gritty with its accumulation of outdoor tracking, took him to the chipped tile of the back hallway. Here, he unbolted and cracked open the door to the garage and let the chilly night air slap him to an even more complete state of consciousness.

  As his eyes adjusted, his nearly nude flesh prickled, goose-bumped. His nostrils twitched at the garage’s harsh scent of rusting tools and spilled lubricants. Hiding beneath those odors was another, the choking fumes of an idling engine in an enclosed space. This, then, was the sound that had roused him.

  His eyes teared up and he coughed sharply. The air gradually cleared, as was always the case.

  She came at him from out of the lifting fog.

  “It’s about time,” she said. “Any idea how long I waited for you tonight?”

  He didn’t.

  Neither did she, she had to admit. “Time is different where I come from. Not so…linear.”

  Laney leaned against the passenger door of his treasured yellow ’69 punch bug Beetle. One hand on the hood, her pose reminiscent of some bikini model in one of his hot rod magazines. She was pretty enough for such a spread, he supposed, but her hips were too full. It was obvious she hadn’t died an anorexic. Her outfit was all wrong for a magazine layout too. She wore the burgundy tailored suit he’d seen her in just about every evening lately. Because, she’d told him, she loved the way it fit her.

  But more to the point, because it was what she’d had on when he killed her.

  He gummed out the sleep from one eye and took the two steps down to garage level. He twitched slightly as his bare feet found the freezing-cold cement floor.

  “Chilly,” he said, pressing his bare legs together and rubbing both hands between his thighs for friction warmth. He wore a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else.

  No response, and he thought, How do you make small talk with a ghost?

  She finally gave him a thin smile. “I wouldn’t complain. At least you can feel the temperature. To me, it’s like watching TV. I can see and hear what’s going on, but as far as smell, taste and feel go…”

  She shook her head as if at the futility of even explaining.

  She was just warming up. In one of her moods, Laney could turn everything he said against him. He sighed, dropped to a seated position on that bottom cement step and resigned himself to yet another long night with his conscience.

  His dead wife said, “That might be what I miss most. The feel of the night air against my skin. An actual sensation. It’s like dreaming of sex rather than doing it. Another thing, by the way, which I can no longer experience. The afterlife? You can have it, far as I’m concerned.”

  He dropped his face into his hands. He wasn’t going to get any sleep again tonight. The alarm clock’s buzz in a couple hours was going to be brutal.

  “What’s with you?” she asked. “You don’t want to talk tonight, that it?”

  She started to pace, her sharp heels beating the hard, cold floor into submission. The cramped proportions of the double-stall space—one stall occupied—necessitated a change of directions every few steps. He could see the pockmarks of her nubby heels in the newer oil slicks and wondered how that could be. His imaginary dead wife leaving prints?

  She lectured and harangued as she paced. She reminded him of her favorite meals and her dead taste buds. She reflected on the small pleasures—the scent of flowers, long, sex-slick summer nights in bed, the feel of the sun on her face. Gone, gone and gone.

  He tried not to listen. He’d heard it all before, all the times she’d visited him these last several weeks. Worse yet, they were growing in frequency. Third night in a row now. Last night, more of the same, leaving him shaky with fatigue at work. He braced his head on open palms and tried to sleep while she went at him.

  Laney didn’t mind. Her mouth ran with the relentless monotony of the Volkswagen engine—the engine that he only imagined to have earlier filled his garage and lungs with noxious exhaust. Then something she said nuzzled him back.

  “He said you owe me big time, and he’s right, you know. After what you did to—”

  “Wait. Hold on. What?” He mentally braced his eyelids open. “Who said this?”

  She stopped pacing, rolled her eyes dramatically and let her fingers dance over a circular saw blade she’d taken from its place on the shelf a few feet from the VW grille. That had always annoyed him, the way she’d play with his things like that. She’d come into his study and start leafing through his magazines or switching channels with his remote while chatting, always chatting.

  She set his saw blade aside—on the wrong shelf, of course—and returned her attention to him. “Well, Vincent, of course. Who are we talking about here? Vincent says that atonement is the only thing that will set things right. Vincent says that everything we do leaves tracks, like walking in snow.”

  Or like pacing in motor oil stains, he thought, while staring at her still-visible footprints.

  “What remains now, says Vincent, is for you to clean up those tracks. It’s your penance, hon. You can put it off but you can’t evade it. Just like you can’t outrun those snow tracks.” She giggled as if fascinated by how her analogy held up.

  “You don’t even know Vincent,” he told his dead wife somewhat petulantly. “He came after you were gone.” He furthermore couldn’t believe that the gentle minister had originated the course of action Laney had been proposing to him for weeks now. It seemed so out of character.

  Now she sat on the hood of his beloved Beetle, although he couldn’t recall her having moved in that direction. She slapped one meaty thigh. “What happens now, killer?”

  He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do what she and, supposedly, Vincent requested of him. Big deal. It was only his imagination trying to have its way with him.

  Wasn’t it?

  He yawned, slumped, toppled slightly until his spine found the door jamb. He let his head drop forward into his pillowing hands. “I gotta sleep,” he mumbled. “Can’t take another night of this.”

  “That’s fine,” she replied cheerfully. Her voice now came at him from the foot of the garage, although once again he’d been unaware of movement. “We’ll chat some more tomorrow night, okay?”

  Chapter Five

  He heard her trying to rouse him twice, her voice growing progressively edgier, more put out, before he gave up and struggled to a sitting position on the bed. He double-gripped his face, pulling at the cottony clutches of sleep still in his brain. He was fuzzily aware of the earthy smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen and the much nearer allure of Patty’s perfume.

  But that last scent was a bad sign. It meant she was too far along in her work preparation process for him to be groggily shaking off sleep.

  “It’s about time,” she grumped.

  Tim yawned, tried to cover the involuntary reflex with his hand, but she’d already spotted it.

  “So what time did you get in last night?” she asked with deceptive unconcern.

  He shrugged, though she wasn’t looking. He drew his bony knees up and watched her from over them.

  Patty, astride the low bench in front of her dressing table, was well into the crimping stage of production, where tiny finish-up steps—a tweaking, a smoothing—brought the whole picture together.

  Her eyes found his in her tabletop makeup mirror. “Well?” She was tall and slender, but with hips and curves, attractive even with hair that hung loose and lifeless despite her best efforts and those of the city’s most accomplished stylists.

  He said, “You’ll never guess what happened.”

  “Would you say it was later than eleven?”

  Patty’s problem, as near as Tim could figure, was her long-held Kimmler family belief that legitimate labor began early in the day and put you to bed at a decent hour so you could get up early the next day and start it all over again. Kimmlers were industrious, unimaginative people who punched t
ime clocks. They’d been skeptical of Patty’s compulsion to get a college degree and her insistence on moving in with a fellow college grad who’d lost his job in advertising and now worked full-time playing recorded music at weddings and in bars. Was that really even a job?

  Though she’d never admit it, Patty had adopted a similar world view. Their spats largely revolved around some aspect of Tim’s late hours and subsequently inactive days.

  “I guess you don’t remember my phone call,” he said.

  Patty twirled her hairbrush while she eyed his reflection in her makeup mirror. “I think so,” she said slowly.

  He thought she’d sounded altogether too understanding when she’d picked up. Now he knew she’d been at least half out, the two of them on radically different sleep cycles.

  “You seemed pretty groggy. I called from that video store on the corner of Broadview and Utica Lane. Afterthought, or something.”

  Her brows knitted. “You rented a movie? At that hour?”

  Tim shook his head. “I’d just gotten back from the house of that guy I told you about.”

  “Charlotte’s friend,” she said, her voice flat. “The one with the music collection.”

  He snatched the bedsheet aside and did a naked flip-flop so he was belly down, his head at the foot of the bed. “Listen, Patty. I’m serious about this. I couldn’t even tabulate all the music he had. Not to mention pirated concert stuff on tape. He let me have a few CDs and some tapes and vinyl for what I had in my wallet until I can come back with the rest.”

  “How much?” she said.

  Don’t hesitate, he told himself, hesitating. It’ll only make it worse. “Three hundred. And worth every penny. He told me he’d keep the rest of it off of Craigslist for a couple weeks, give me time to raise the rest. Said he wouldn’t do that except that I’m a friend of Charlotte’s.”

  “Tapes? Vinyl? Is my calendar wrong, or aren’t the eighties over?”

  How could he explain? MP3s were just electrons. Or protons. They represented music as a concept, but not something you could hold in your hands. “It’s not the same,” he said, but it even sounded feeble to his own ears.